The invention relates to an electronic card for electromagnetic data exchange, the electronic card having an electronic circuit, which is contained in a housing, as well as process for manufacturing such a card.
Electronic cards with an implemented electronic circuit are already known and are used, for example, as telephone cards, as credit cards with an integrated telephone card function, etc. In these cases, the electronic circuit is contained in an hermetically-encapsulated casing and is placed upon a supporting element of the electronic card. The disadvantage of this procedure is that it can be carried out only at rather high costs, since the encapsulating of the microchip is difficult to carry out, due to the temperature sensitivity of its electronic components.
Nowadays such electronic cards are used not only for the above-mentioned functions, but they are also used as so-called transponder cards, such as electronic cards for a radio-frequency identification system for tracing luggage, for example. Here the electronic circuit consists of an antenna element and an evaluation unit connected to the antenna element via thin wires. Due to its spatial extension, such an electronic circuit can no longer be encapsulated by a simple plastics injection moulding process--like a microchip for example--since the wires connecting the antenna element and the evaluating unit of the electronic circuit would be damaged due to the pressure resulting from the injection moulding process. Therefore, at present the electronic circuit has to be sealed via a laminating process, carried out at a temperature of 130.degree. for 20 to 30 minutes. The disadvantage of using such a procedure is that the necessary working temperature for the electronic card circuit generally reaches the limits of technological feasibility, so that during the present production of such an electronic cards a high failure rate is expected.
It must be clarified that the above-mentioned cards are cards which are neither electronic cards such as are used with personal computers for example, nor electronic cards whose casing already constitutes the final casing for the electronic card.